Burtons best.

Just rewatched this recently too - Wingard just loves big monsters and he wants to show us why! Wonderful visual storytelling to center Kong and Godzilla's story.

"Oh God, that doesn't make me feel great, because that's not what I expected" - you can give someone that unexpected feeling without rolling the dice on rage-bait.

He seems to think there is no middle ground between 'kids gloves' and 'subversion'.

RJ both gives himself too much credit and dodges any blame for the reaction when he cites "shaking things up" as the culprit. He sidelined the story and rewrote characters so he could make his meta commentary. Maybe don't do the subversion schtick in the penultimate film in a 40+ yr story.

I find it funny the 'darker tone' of this movie comes up so often. This is the one where missile penguins play a large role in the climax, right? Thought so.

This is one of those magic movies where every piece came together to make a great film. But here we have a great script, realized with Burtons glorified-production-designer directing, populated by heavy hitters. Any 1 element changes and the movie collapses.

Anyways, Im always impressed how uninterested Kubrick is with his props. Theres very little focus on individual elements, theres no items of power. Its all characters and their carefully crafted environments.

In a lesser horror movie, there would be a scene where Wendy finds newspaper clippings of the murders that happened there, explaining all the visions. There is no logic lifeboat aboard this ship, and you feel all the terror they do.

Reminds me of the 2001 novel, where its explained HAL basically went mad because it was keeping a secret. A neat idea! But so much more effective to say nothing when its a movie about (among other things) the spark of evolution.

I can understand why people would go down all these Room 237 rabbit holes. While i love Kubrick, i think his galaxy brain is primarily on the filmcraft level. The explanation being "a haunted hotel exploited a mans weakness and drove him mad" is lame compared to the actual movie experience.

Goes without saying that his vignette habit only became a problem when the legendary editor that made him famous passed away.